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Close Encounters With Fox News

Roger Ailes, the pugnacious chairman of Fox News, developed his philosophy as he shaped the media efforts of two presidential campaigns—Richard Nixon’s and George H.W. Bush’s. Ailes knows how to make a candidate look presidential. And he also knows how to throw a punch. He’s not just more conservative than Fox’s famously conservative owner, Rupert Murdoch, but also more steeped in the world of politics than his boss, who still thinks of himself as running a journalistic outfit.

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It was Ailes who decided to establish Fox News as the “voice of the opposition” in fall 2008, at the dawn of the Obama era, as Fox’s executive vice president, Bill Shine, put it to me. And it was Ailes who—with the disappearance of the smoke-filled back rooms where old-time pols cut deals and the absence of a clear-cut figure to champion in the past two presidential elections—decided to make Fox News the umpire and arbiter of Republican politics.

But it’s a mistake to view his genius, as many of his critics and fans do, solely in terms of his conservative ideology. A former television producer for The Mike Douglas Show, Ailes likes to create fast-paced shows with a sense of humor and featuring attractive women, confident men and snappy graphics. (See, for example, the chirpy morning show Fox & Friends.) Nor is he completely confined by his ideological beliefs—indeed, one can often find his flexible political impulses swiftly reflected on the air. After the 2012 elections, he lectured his top aides about the need to show support for relaxing immigration restrictions, as he believed harsh Republican rhetoric was alienating many Latino voters. The very next day, talk show host Sean Hannity declared an evolution in his thinking on the subject.

Ailes’s sharp instincts play out well beyond politics, too: They are reflected in the strategy and tactics he adopts in playing the media game more generally. He and his crew define opponents before they define themselves—and they identify opponents all over. Nowhere is this esprit de combat embodied more fully than in Fox News’s public relations department.

Some TV public relations shops cajole and flatter reporters and bloggers who profile news anchors and opinion hosts and track the ratings fortunes of television news programs with Talmudic care. Others manage the coverage, trying to fend off critical scrutiny and periodically leaking damaging information about competitors.Fox News does all these things and much, much more. Its PR staffers turn almost every query into a hostile challenge, an invasive strike to be blunted or repelled. Their approach constitutes by far the most aggressive I’ve ever encountered from a publicity team—a grudge match that was in no way personal and yet grew more bizarre the more I butted heads with Fox over my 13 years covering the media.

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When the channel launched in 1996, Ailes tapped Brian Lewis, his alter ego and young aide at CNBC, to lead his PR division. Irena Briganti joined the network that same year, and over time became Lewis’s deputy, playing the role of bad cop to his somewhat softer touch. Before Lewis was suddenly fired this past summer, the two considered their joint performance a key component of their channel’s ratings dominance and the billion dollars a year it was generating for News Corp, then its parent corporation. And they operated with a relatively lean and hungry crew: about seven or eight people for the whole network at any given time.

From my earliest days as a reporter and media critic at the Baltimore Sun, my encounters with Fox’s PR representatives showed them to be sharp and contentious. Early one morning in December 2001, I called Fox to try to sort out the basis of a story by the network’s new chief war correspondent, Geraldo Rivera. Rivera had been a swashbuckling investigative reporter, then a network news magazine star, a tabloid talk show host and finally a political talk show host under Ailes at CNBC. Still under contract with CNBC in the fall of 2001, Rivera had bristled at the idea of staying behind a desk while a war raged elsewhere, so he quit his CNBC talk show and rejoined Ailes at Fox. Rivera soon traveled to Afghanistan, where the United States was taking on al Qaeda and the Taliban in retribution for the Sept. 11 attacks.

He was, Rivera announced, on a quest to track down “the dastardly one” (his personal term for Osama bin Laden). On an early December day, he showed footage from Afghanistan, twice in a 24-hour period, in which he prayed over the site where he said three American soldiers and numerous allied Afghan fighters had been killed by a U.S. bombing raid in what was euphemistically called a “friendly fire” incident. He said he had seen their tattered uniforms and showed himself, on video, reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

There was a problem, however: Rivera filed his report less than a day later from Tora Bora, a cave complex in the White Mountains roughly 300 miles northeast of the site where the bombs actually fell in Kandahar. I talked to reporters in Afghanistan, people who handled logistics at rival networks, senior staffers with international relief agencies and human rights groups active there, and U.S. military officials. None of them thought the journey from Tora Bora to Kandahar and back was feasible by road in less than 24 hours, while an official at the Pentagon told me that Rivera certainly had not hitched a ride with U.S. forces or aircraft.

When I wondered how Rivera could have made the round trip down and back in a single day, given the bombed-out roads, the rival warlords and the highway bandits patrolling what routes were functioning, Briganti angrily asked whether I was saying Rivera had made it up. By the time Fox consented to an interview, deadlines approached. Because of the nine-and-a-half-hour time-zone difference in Afghanistan, they said, Rivera was asleep and unreachable. Wait aday, and we’ll give you Geraldo. By that point, we at the Sun could have run a story without speaking to him. But my section’s editors and I agreed it would make the story stronger to talk to Rivera. I imposed one condition—that he would talk to no other reporters that day. Fox News agreed.

The next day, Rivera gave me a vivid and livid interview by satellite phone. But he interspersed his anger toward what he clearly saw as my impertinence with a fascinatingly self-aware account of the various twists and turns in his career. Finally, Rivera said he had been confused by another, similar friendly-fire incident that killed a group of Afghan rebels: “The fog of war,” he said. And yet as newspaper reports and accounts by human rights groups and the Pentagon subsequently demonstrated, that separate incident involving only Afghans did not happen until the following week.

But the Fox PR people had taken some protective steps. Despite their promise, Rivera also spoke to Associated Press television reporter David Bauder. In this interview, Rivera boasted that he carried a gun, despite journalistic conventions advising against it. Such bravado created the fear that armed reporters might appear to al Qaeda fighters as little different from combatants, and then all journalists in war zones would become targets. The AP’s global reach ensured that Rivera’s tale of packing heat drained the appetite for any other controversies he might have engendered. Hundreds of newspapers published Bauder’s story. Meanwhile, Fox’s Brigantileft a message on my voicemail, suggesting that only minor media outlets had paid attention to my story: “Reuters and MarketWatch? Pretty pathetic placement, my friend.”

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I wrote a second article, a few days later, weighing whether a television news network had an obligation to acknowledge and correct an error such as the one Rivera had made. The Drudge Report picked that one up—and the second story ricocheted around the world. Fox put out a tepid statement to the AP between Christmas and New Year’s Eve—a media dead zone—stating that Rivera had made an “honest mistake.” No formal correction appeared on air. All this landed me on Fox’s blacklist. The policy, approved by Ailes and set out by Lewis, forbade anyone at the network from talking to me. I only later learned that staffers internally had a term for the constantly changing roster of offenders that Fox PR staffers review on a regular basis: “Irena’s doghouse.” But that was something of a misnomer. She was not doing anything Lewis, and ultimately Ailes, did not want done.

After about 15 months, Rob Zimmerman, a network spokesman who had at one time accused me of launching a vendetta against the network, called me to say Fox was wiping the slate clean. I continued to work with the public relations department on what I consider to be a professional basis—profiling such Fox anchors and hosts as Shepard Smith, Brit Hume, Bret Baier, John Stossel and Glenn Beck. The PR department’s retribution was meant to punish me and to warn others. But it was not personal. And it did not last.

A year or two after I broke the Rivera story, Fox News invited me as a guest to the White House correspondents’ dinner, a hot ticket in Washington, D.C. It was a deeply inside joke for the amusement of its publicity department and the small world of media reporters who took any note. The Baltimore Sun paid the cost of my $135 ticket. And I had a good time, dining and drinking, without guilt, among the same Fox News staffers who had been told not to talk to me for more than a year. Years later, when my wife and I got married, the Fox News PR team sent over an exquisite bottle of champagne from a 2002 vintage—specifically picked by Lewis, Briganti pointed out, to honor a prize I had won for the Rivera story. Nice touch. It was a shame to have to return it.